A Growing Game

Current Internet Trends Put Mobile Marketing On The Rise

Erin Sandage

The Internet has come a long way in 20 years. Back in the early days, users didn’t mind waiting for a dial-up connection to slowly … very slowly, load a page. Today, that’s unheard of. It is also rare, and frustrating, to come across a website that isn’t mobile friendly. There are 2.8 billion Internet users and most of them prefer to browse on their mobile devices, i.e. by smartphones and laptops. There is a direct connection between increased mobile use and an increase in mobile advertising.

Mary Meeker has just released her annual comprehensive breakdown of the current Internet trends. Meeker is partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. She focuses on investments in the firm’s digital practice and helps lead KPCB’s Digital Growth Funds, targeting high-growth Internet companies that have achieved rapid adoption and scale. She has released an Internet Trends report since 1995.

The 2015 report looks at key Internet trends globally. Internet engagement continues to rise led by consumers spending more time on their mobile devices, where they can be connected 24/7. Mobile data usage grew by 69 percent last year, with 55 percent of the traffic being videos. People spend an average of three hours per day on their mobile devices. This is a key factor The Locator has witnessed personally.

Between 2013 and 2014, mobile visits to www.partslocator.com increased 54 percent and tablet visits increased 58 percent. So far this year (from January 2015 to May 2015), mobile visits have increased 162 percent and tablets have increased 231 percent versus that same time period in 2014. This leads to gaining extra value for mobile marketing solutions.

According to the report, mobile advertising still has headroom to expand. Mobile commands 24 percent of time spent with media, but only eight percent of ad dollars spent. This is a market that has not topped out. There is more than $25 billion in mobile ad opportunities in the United States. The report also shows that while desktop digital advertising also grew, it only did so by 11 percent, which is decelerating versus past years.

There are many options to take advantage of mobile marketing. The Locator, for example, offers banner ads that run both on our desktop and mobile site. The ads, like any other banner ad, continually rotate placement based on a user’s refresh rate and clicks. When the site is mobile, these ads are clearly displayed between blocks of content.

There are some other new and interesting advertising tools for mobile use. These new ad formats are optimized for fast, interactive and fun use. Pinterest uses a cinematic Pin where the video moves as the user scrolls. Facebook has added a carousel ad that scrolls to show multiple images. Google shows which products are available in nearby stores. No matter what type of tool it is, videos play a major role in mobile advertising, with short bursts of information being best.

Some other interesting facts from the report include, China and India are the top countries for mobile subscriptions in 2015. Thirty-nine percent of the mobile subscriptions in China are for smartphones. Pinterest content is growing strong across the board, especially in non-core categories like Car & Motorcycle pins, which are up 118 percent. And users watch four billion videos per day on Facebook. That’s up a billion just from last quarter.

“Ten years from now, when we look back at how this era of big data evolved … we will be stunned at how uninformed we used to be when we made decisions,” Billy Bosworth, DataStax CEO (2015).